I remember paying $10 for an Atari game. I know it’s not a great comparison, but I got hundreds if not thousands of hours of gameplay out of Qbert. Can any of the leading games in the last decade do that?
It’s funny I mention Atari. They had so many games to play. the choices you had were bonkers. best part was you could take your carts to a friends house and trade or share.
can’t do that today since most games are digital downloads that need 32gb day-0 updates.
perhaps the problem isn’t the gamers, but instead it’s the greedy corporate interests that are poisoning the game industry requesting $80 single owner games.
Can any of the leading games in the last decade do that?
Satisfactory, Dyson Sphere project, Factorio, Minecraft, Dreamlight Valley
Arcade games were great because it’s what we had. Sit a kid in front a Q-Bert now and try to get 1000 hours out of it.
Stuff is getting too big, there’s too much emphasis on making it pretty to sell it rather than making it fun, but I don’t know that we could go back to arcade games. I fear our nostalgia is a half-dose of Stockholm’s syndrome.
$50-60 based on what? Adjusted for inflation in 1982, it’s more like $33 and distribution costs are way lower than back then. Truth is you just need to find a compelling gameplay loop but companies don’t like taking risks- not every game needs to be a massive endeavor like skyrim. Look at games like slay the spire and see how a cheap game can be compelling without having to be a AAA behemoth. And at that note, is there even anything wrong if a game only takes your attention for a hundred hours? I don’t see the need to extend the player’s attention with poor side quest grinding. These things add unnecessary cost
Wow, shift goalposts much? You said “$10 in qbert days” which was the 80s and now it’s not $10 it’s $30. You can just admit you got it wrong and it was never $10 (though I do think prices right now are actually well aligned at $60 because of the far lower costs in distribution and marketing). Also I’m NOT the OP who played thousands of hours on qbert. Great job quoting someone else.
The other thing is that there was simply fewer games back then so you either continue to play the good games you own or you don’t play games. I loved Ocarina of Time, but I’m not going to pretend it was God’s gift to mankind just because I played it tons in my youth. I played it tons in my youth because it was one of the best games that I owned, and even then I had plenty more options than I’m sure this person had on the Atari for good games
Give it a year. Thankfully Toys for Bob was able to buy themselves out, otherwise surely they would have either been shut down or put to work in the Call of Duty mines.
Edit: By “it works” I mean the link can be clicked on. If the formatting looks wrong, check to see if the client you are using supports subscript/superscript fonts.
Looks like Lemmy has decided to use a flavor of Markdown which is inconsistent from Mbin’s. That’s a shame.
Weirdly enough, different Lemmy Android clients for Lemmy also work differently with the scripts formatting, each having their own quirks. One person though did fix their problem by upgrading their client app to the latest version.
I had thought it was all one single standard, when first started using the formatting. My original intent was just to have a smaller font, as I was at first just using the link format without any subscripting, but people were complaining about that, so I was trying to compromise and make it smaller.
That isn’t how anything works. This is like those people on Facebook posting their voodoo chainmail posts about their comments and profiles. You don’t own your comments to transfer a license in the first place.
You truly have no idea what you’re talking about. Multiple times now you haven’t even been able to grasp something as stupidly simple as different people talking to you.
You sir, are a moron.
It must be a strange feeling to be the current laughing stock of Lemmy right now. I hope you’re able to learn from this.
“I DO NOT GRANT PERMISSION TO LAW ENFORCEMENT TO READ THIS COMMENT. ANY USE OF THIS COMMENT BY LAW ENFORCEMENT FOR ANY REASON IS ILLEGAL. THIS COMMENT CANNOT BE USED AS EVIDENCE AGAINST ANY NON-LAW ENFORCEMENT PERSONS IN RELATION TO ANY CRIME.”
Aha, so you actually read it? Thanks for clarifying.
I have. Both versions. I was just linking to the easy to read version (canonical), but by declaring my comment as licensed means it is covered by CC BY-NC-SA 4.0, and you can get to the legal version from the canonical version.
So you didn’t reach the conclusion that this license is incompatible with posting on Lemmy?
Are you a lawyer? No? Well then be sure to come back here once you get your degree and let us know the final word on this.
Idk first thing about any of this, but I do think with MSFT controlling Windows, Azure, Xbox, GitHub, OpenAI, Teams; at some point one has to ask if MSFT is just too big for no good.
Think about it, a competing game studio might be paying MSFT for Windows licenses, Teams for internal communication, Azure for game servers, GitHub for hosting their source code, ChatGPT Pro for using AI in smart ways and finally a 30% cut to Xbox Store, only to compete with bazillions of first party titles under Xbox Game Studios.
Now think of a big publishers, they need to somehow compete with GamePass, which takes all the money MSFT can throw at it and makes game sales kinda irrelevant. Why would a consumer buy a $70 game when they can play other games for $15 max a month. Even if it’s $30 a month, it’s still a steal. Why would a studio go to a big publisher and give up bigger chunk of revenues (Outriders didn’t get much under Square Enix despite being on GamePass) when they could just become a second party developer with XGS and rake in whatever cash flow positive MSFT would give them before the game is even launched, with a bonus of marketing of “Day One With GamePass”.
In nut shell, MSFT makes a tonne money during development even if the game isn’t released on Xbox, and Xbox Game Studios slowly hollows out competing publishers by using the MSFT money to secure deals with third party studios or straight up acquiring them. They can adjust profitability by tweaking prices at several touch points of this huge Microsoft services pipeline.
If Xbox was broken away from MSFT, they’ll become yet another publisher, though a pretty big one, without the daddy money. It would make the industry more competitive between publishers, but it may also probably lead to egregious monetization strategies like we already see these days, because MSFT is uniquely positioned to do what they’re doing.
Similar things can be said about Amazon or Google. How is it that if Netflix succeeds AWS wins and if Prime succeeds, AWS still wins? How can Google make the search engine, video hosting platform, dominant browser and a ads platform and cross pollinate money like crazy? If big companies weren’t allowed to build such synergetic businesses, consumers might be paying to several different companies, but they’ll also be seeing competition in each of those domains, driving prices lower, hopefully.
So yeah, I support the idea of breaking up companies that start dealing with orthogonal domains that end up creating a nest of services that no competitor can easily break free from.
IDK, just because Microsoft has products in a variety of categories doesn’t pose problems in itself, the problem is when those products command a significant chunk of the market share to the point where they can control a big chunk of the market. From your list:
GitHub - problematic because it’s the biggest code hosting platform around, but on its own isn’t a big issue
Teams - doesn’t really dominate, and many orgs use Slack or something else for communication
Xbox and XGS - not an issue unless either dominates their respective markets; buying large publishers like Activision is a serious issue
Azure - they’re like second or third, so there should be a close watch to make sure there isn’t monopolistic behavior with integrations with GitHub, Xbox, etc
And so on. I don’t personally think they should be broken up, but acquisitions in sectors where they already have significant market share should be blocked.
Exactly, on their own the products aren’t harmful at all. The problem comes when MSFT can leverage their position to undercut prices or shoving their products in other products.
How can slack compete, despite being a superior product, when MSFT puts Teams in the effing taskbar of Windows and sells it for half the price, and bundles it with office?
How can bitbucket or gitlab compete if MSFT integrates npm, GitHub, Azure, GitHub Copilot, VSCode and so many other dev tools so well, for much lower price?
Azure is second, yes, but my company, like many other companies, uses Azure over AWS because MSFT gives a sweet deal where Azure, Outlook, OneDrive, GitHub, Teams are all bundled in such a way that it’ll be expensive to use individual companies for each, and also a big hassle. And when MSFT becomes an incubator for a startup, it’s even better deal for the startup. How can digital ocean, for example, compete with that?
I mean that’s what happened with Internet Explorer. Netscape couldn’t compete coz MSFT could give IE for free and bundle it into the operating system. Google did something similar by getting other softwares to bundle Chrome with them in the installation process, and also asking users to use chrome on all Google properties. Firefox can never compete with IE or Chrome or Safari, as long as these big companies can integrate their services and products so seamlessly.
So you’re absolutely right, individually none of the products are harmful, infact some of them are really good deals for consumers, but due to them all being under one umbrella, it’s hard for competition to thrive.
Both of these are free and open source. There’s a paid hosting tier for NPM, but it’s easy to self-host that.
But your larger point stands. The more tools they can package together, the more they can push out competition. Why use Slack if it’s a pain to integrate with GitHub and Office, but Teams works smoothly? This is certainly not unique to Microsoft, look at Apple as a clear example. The App Store forbids competition with Safari’s rendering engine, and that limits the competition other browsers can provide. Apple has its own ecosystem around iMessage and iCloud that don’t work outside that ecosystem. So if we’re going to make rules that target Microsoft’s bundling of functionality, it should also target Apple as well.
I’m less concerned about price and more concerned about exposed capability. IMO, Teams shouldn’t have any different access to Office or GitHub as Slack has. Once you have a large market share, you need to be extra careful about how your apps communicate to ensure that other apps can directly compete.
And as you mentioned, I think defaults are part of the problem. Mobile Safari isn’t dominant on iOS because it’s better, it’s dominant because it’s the default. Same with Edge on Windows and Chrome on Android. If there’s competition for a given product, it shouldn’t be bundled with the OS, and if the product is important for most users, it should prompt the user for what to use. I can see exceptions here for basic functionality (e.g. a dialer on a phone, or file browser on a desktop OS), but that definition needs to be very restrictive.
Glad I could make my point clearer. It’s hard to narrow down what feels wrong about this level of consolidation, and given MSFT’s track record in recent years, it’s hard to say they’re definitely going to become evil, but just that possibility feels scary.
Microsoft has already been evil, and I think there’s a good chance they’ll do it again if given the chance. The best company IMO is someone who is in second or third place (e.g. AMD v Intel, MS v Google, etc). As long as there are at least three competent players in a field, things tend to stay pretty competitive.
You just listed a bunch of Microsoft made products + GitHub + openAI (who they don’t control) - why shouldn’t they be allowed to control products they created?
You’re also talking like Microsoft is the market leader in game consoles when they’re a distant last and getting further behind. If this acquisition was blocked it would basically be game over for Xbox, and I would bet it would be sold off or go third party software only and exit the hardware market within a few years. Sony are the ones people need to be worried about here as they have a long history of abusing their dominant position and making blatantly anti-consumer moves based on that position.
Without Xbox as a competitor Sony would have free reign with no one to stop them. The video game industry is one of the most expensive industries any company can get into. Google tried and failed. Sega exited. Xbox is the last real competitor that entered and stayed and that was over 20 years ago, and the only reason it’s still around is to stop Sony from getting a monopoly in the living room.
You’re right. A company should be allowed to create and acquire other companies, no doubt in that.
The problem, as I listed above in the very long post, is unique to the big tech players where they can create such synergetic businesses that it’s pretty difficult for anyone to compete or break free from that.
What you’re saying makes great sense. Xbox indeed needs more and more IPs and more importantly much better quality control to compete with Sony. They lost the last generation, and they need to do everything in their power to course correct. After ABK, they would match Sony in number of IPs and maybe surpass them in number of studios. Fair enough. But, as a whole, this gives a lot more power to MSFT, and my question is simply whether it’s too much power or not.
Calling what Google did trying is a bad joke. Stadia failed because and exclusively because it was a fucking horseshit premise with no redeeming qualities.
That’s basically what I’ve been saying ever since the switch 2 announcement, I’m glad I can just copy the Sources from this article to support my intuition. Thank you, Superjoost!
For the last 10 years I’ve only paid full price for one AAA game: Elden Ring. I’ve gotten something like 200 hours out of it. It may be the best value for a AAA game ever, in my book. (And I haven’t yet played the expansion.)
I’m happy to wait for sales on everything else, including the secondary market for Nintendo games, but after their recent fuckery in multiple arenas, I’m not keen buying anything they produce. (Not that it matters. Their stuff will sell regardless.)
Hopefully, I won’t have to get the console for several months - if not years. Nintendo’s launch titles usually aren’t anything to write home about. BotW was a notable exception in recent memory, but was also available on the previous generation.
Well, no, once a Monster Hunter game releases on the S2, my partner makes me buy one.
I could get something else, assuming cross play exists, but the only exclusives across all platforms I care about are games made by Monolith. So, at some point I’ll need the S2.
I notice they tend to have one “killer app” and then the rest of it isn’t much to write home about, at least since the N64 (SNES had a whopping 2: F-Zerp and Mario World). The exception being the Wii U, which had… Nintendo Land? NSMB-U? Nothing really.
N64: Mario 64 (and had almost literally nothing else until StarFox) GameCube: Luigi’s Mansion Wii: Twilight Princess, or Wii Sports, since TP also released for GameCube Switch: BotW
It’s been so long since Odyssey and we’ve just had Totk, I’d guess another 3D Mario is likely their S2 ‘killer app’. Could be Legends Z-A or Metroid Prime 4 too, both of which would be cross generation. However, I’m not exactly dying to get my hands on any of these either way, especially not Pokemon.
Yeah, I’m betting on at least a new 3D Mario too. Wouldn’t be surprised if Z-A was cross generation. Maybe the new Mario Kart they showed off in the short trailer. I don’t think Prime 4 will be out right at launch but I could see it in the first year.
I’m not sure this is going to directly affect that, because their deal talks mainly about financing for the Control game, and the other news is about movie adaptations, so probably it is going to be another team, lead by the newly re-hired Hector Sanchez, working on that…
But who knows, this kind of things are always hard to follow from the outside
‘So you’re saying he hacked your game.’ And I hear in the background: ‘I didn’t hack anything!’ I start describing it more technically. She says, ‘Is this a problem?’ I say, ‘Hacking software, that’s a federal crime, but I don’t want that to be the conversation. Why don’t we make it a conversation about the good and bad things he can do with a computer?’
To the people saying he threatened a kid, I think he did the exact opposite? He made them aware that technically it’s a crime, to convey the severity, but also said he doesn’t want that to be the conversation he’s having with the parents.
To me that sounds like he didn’t want to threaten with legal action, but the parents did need to be aware that it was a crime, technically speaking.
The parent literally asked whether their kid was in trouble. Wouldn’t it be disingenuous to not answer truthfully (at the caveat that it was actually the truth)?
I saw it more as a way to resolve it peacefully without getting to the stuff nobody likes
And he still didnt answer yes or no. His response, to immediately bring up that “hacking” is a federal crime, implied that the kid is in trouble, but then what he said after changed it to “well, the kid WOULD be in trouble, but if you do XYZ, maybe we can change that.” That’s a threat, plain and simple.
I think the crime here is to post those images online? I don’t know the specifics of US copyright law. This article is about leaking though, the datamining wasn’t the problem.
bloomberg.com
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